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AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Senator John McCain leaves the chamber after speaking. W ith the collapse of Republican efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act, there is renewed talk of a bipartisan effort to improve the program. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, has called on the Republicans to work with Democrats to stabilize insurance markets and cut costs. McConnell says he will make one more push for a simple repeal. But he doesn’t have the votes. As a last resort, McConnell has said he, too, will turn to a bipartisan fix in the ACA’s defects. But what would that mean? The defects, from the Democratic perspective, are that Obamacare covers too little at too high a cost, while most Republicans fault the ACA for covering too much at taxpayer expense. There is, however, a deeper defect in the entire approach, and that is the ACA’s touching faith in market competition. In theory, having lots of insurers in a given market competing for customers via regulated “...

AP Photo/Alex Brandon President Donald Trump walks in front of Chinese President Xi Jinping as Xi arrives before dinner at Mar-a-Lago. This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post. Subscribe here . T rump’s fulminations about NAFTA, subsidized Chinese steel, protected Canadian dairy products, and failed Obama-era trade deals have produced a spate of articles warning about the damage Trump’s trade policy could do to the global economic order. The most instructive of these was a recent New York Times piece by their senior economic writer, Eduardo Porter. Porter began: “It seems President Trump is ready to start rolling back globalization. Let’s hope he doesn’t blow up the postwar economic order.” According to Porter, Trump might turn his back on the World Trade Organization as “he retreats from prior American commitments to global trade.” Porter asks, rhetorically, “Will he eschew the multilateral framework in pursuit of a set of bilateral deals, turning his back on a long...

Rex Features via AP Images A placard depicts Jeremy Corbyn in the same way as the famous Barack Obama posters. This article appears in the Summer 2017 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here . T he British election demonstrated that with the right combination of luck, circumstance, and leadership, popular economic grievances can go left as well as right. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader who was long dismissed as hopelessly old left, demonstrated that if left means taxing the rich and restoring popular services such as free higher education, that sort of left is what lots of voters want, especially the young. Under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour made its biggest gains in a single election—about ten points—since Clement Attlee’s epic defeat of Winston Churchill in 1945. But Labour did not win a governing majority. Instead, British politics is more muddled than ever, and the politics of exit from the European Union only adds to the muddle. The narrow referendum vote in...

Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi holds her weekly on camera press conference in the Capitol. This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post. Subscribe here . H ow discouraged should Democrats be after failing to win any of the four recent House special elections to fill vacancies? The losses, most recently of Jon Ossoff, in Georgia’s Sixth District, triggered a blame game, directed against House leader Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic National Committee, the tacticians of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and candidate Ossoff himself. For starters, consider the numbers. Every one of these races was a long shot, and in every case the Democrat did notably better than his counterpart in 2014 or 2016. Ossoff lost by 3.7 points. In 2016, the Democrat lost the seat by 16.2 points. In other words, Ossoff improved the Democratic performance by more than 12 points. Likewise in the Kansas Fourth District election of April 11, Democrat...

AP Photo/Susan Walsh President Donald Trump walks to Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House. This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post. Subscribe here . T he general assumption in Washington has been that only one of two things could cause the Republican leadership to turn on President Trump and begin removal proceedings, either under the 25th Amendment or via articles of impeachment. One would be a smoking gun so dramatic that Republicans would be compelled to move. That could be some new revelation of direct collusion between Trump personally and the Russian government. Or it could be documented conflicts of interest where Trump explicitly used his office for personal enrichment. Or it might be Trump firing special counsel Robert Mueller, either before or after Mueller issued subpoenas compelling the White House to produce evidence. That, coupled with Trump’s ouster of FBI chief James Comey, would compound the president’s obstruction of justice. With each day...